I'd like to see more tools on how to quit addictive behaviors. I read Power of Habit, so I can easily quit things, but not everyone was lucky to be gifted a 300 page book and read it. If that was taught as a class in high school, it might eliminate long-term drug addiction.
How many times are people subjecting themselves to social media they don't really want to view because they habitually unlock their phone and check their notifications?
These kind of things are fighting fire with a squirt gun. Telling people to 'use less' and 'monitor' are easy to beat with addictive platforms.
I fall into video game binges rather easily, and what's been helping me a lot is a practice of intentionality & timers. It's a combination of advice from my psychiatrist and therapist, and it's pretty straightforward.
Before doing a thing - particularly things I can easily lose myself in, like doom scrolling - I take a few moments and ask myself what I want out of that time, which naturally dovetails into how long I want to spend at it. Maybe it's ten minutes. Maybe it's three hours. Then I set a timer for that long, and when the timer goes off, (notionally) I halt, walk away from the thing for another few moments and re-evaluate. Maybe I go back. Maybe I don't. Maybe I go back after doing something else for a few minutes (say, loading a dishwasher).
One of the key bits it to not judge myself or my wants. If I want to binge Factorio for a day... like, alright. I'll do that, even if I know later-me won't like having done that. No judgment, no beating myself up about it.
Another key bit seems to be not not doing the thing. That's a hard fight. AFAICT it's one part awareness, one part wedging in some mental/emotional space to make choices inside the habit loop (stimulus -> response -> reward), and one part good old fashioned habit-loop interruption (AFAIK if you literally add breaths-worth of time to each step in the habit loop, it drastically diminishes the oomph of what's happening neurologically).
The magic seems to happen in two forms:
1. "Taking control of my time." - Even if I'm making the same choices, now, my experience is that I am making them, instead of "them" making me.
2. "Stopping before you're tired means you don't start the next thing exhausted". Previously I'd binge until I beyond exhausted my enjoyment of the thing. Now I have a way to do a thing while I'm enjoying it, and stop once I no longer am.
PS - I've also started wondering if this is whatever the hell people actually meant when they talked about "time management" when I was kid, but no-one actually ever explained.
> Another key bit seems to be not not doing the thing. That's a hard fight.
I was told to replace bad habits with other things. It didn't have to be some "good habit", but there had to be something else to fill the void left by the thing I wasn't doing. I had a list (I still have it somewhere) of healthy things that I enjoy, that I can do instead of falling into a porn binge (its been almost 5 years since I last willingly looked at porn) or a YouTube hole (that's been less than a week, small steps).
Having a list of other things to do, things I enjoy, made stopping unhealthy habits a lot easier. I didn't strap myself to "being more productive", rather I just replaced bad habits that produce dopamine hits with enjoyable things that produce dopamine hits.
As devs we could create an app that sets a timer for social media use and then shocks you with a mild electric shock every time you exceed your set limit!
We'll call it the Zapchat or the Zapper and we guarantee it'll be SHOCKING how effective it is at keep us from looking at our screens every 5 min
Many, though not all, of the people here and in the YC ecosystem etc., work or have had worked or otherwise made their careers (and fortunes),
helping concerns whose business model is entirely, openly, founded on maximizing user growth and user engagement. So as to sell personal data in one direction and ads in the other.
This has been something like at trillion-dollar endeavor, and a lot of those dollars have gone into the science (formal and "field") of ensuring those two things.
I.e, to MANUFACTURE ADDICTION.
It's not a bug. It's not just a feature. It's THE feature.
What I tell my own kids, who are not allowed on TikTok, or any Meta property, at all, full stop,
is that against the evolved state of these properties, on our twinkly devices, we have no more defense against addiction than we do against the physiologically analogous fat and sugar.
It's not about discipline.
It's not about habit formation.
It's not about best practices in schools.
It's not about "downtime" and tepid screen time controls.
The problem is more fundamental, and much, much, much uglier, and much, much, much intractable, than most discourse about it admits.
The only solution today, literally, is not to play the game.
Footnote: AI is going to make things 1000x worse, which I would not have believed possible a few years ago.
Yup. Every time people talk about maximizing "engagement", they're talking about manufacturing addiction in users. The solution is the destruction of the business models that require addiction. Make technology to block ads or just straight up make them illegal. Make personal information a huge liability.
> I read Power of Habit, so I can easily quit things,
Most people can easily quit most things, that’s why addiction is treated as a pathological condition.
I suspect its more like “I read Power of Habit, so I am inclined to credit Power of Habit with my normal human ability to quit things” combined with “I exhibit the common human trait of mistaking my normal human ability to quit things with superiority to people who fall into addiction”.
> I read Power of Habit, so I can easily quit things
I mean no ill-intent, but this feels like an incredibly naive thing to say. The inference "I read X book, therefore I am immune to / protected from addiction".
I didn't think it needed spelling out that they were saying "I read this book, I understood its message and was able to incorporate it into my life with notable results, so I am better at quitting or avoiding addictive behavior"
Anecdotal: the app "One Sec" broke my twitter habit over the course of a few weeks.
Via iOS' automations feature the app allows you to configure a per-app waiting period during which you can decide you don't actually want to open whatever app you've tried to open.
Do you find yourself making better use of your time, or do you substitute one time waster with another? I can definitely see how this would help me be more productive during my work hours though...
Second data point. I love that app. Well worth all the money.
I've also customised the automations so I have added friction to opening, for example, Slack after 6PM or on weekends. However it opens immediately during working hours.
Can vouch that this has worked for me as well with Instagram. Just hope one day they would give you the option to remove the "Explore" page. Same with YouTube shorts.
Until the automatic techbro solution to everything ceases to be "well David should just fight Goliath a little harder" (while they quietly give Goliath an automatic rifle to counter David's slingshot), society will just continue to disintegrate.
I mean I think schools should be stricter on cell phone use. I just think it's a bit of a lost cause at this point.
If I had kids I would 100% send them to a school that banned smartphones with dumb phones for texting and calling the only thing allowed between classes.
Turning off adblocking is a good step towards making the internet significantly less pleasant. Maybe somehow requiring people to see more annoying ads would help.
> I'd like to see more tools on how to quit addictive behaviors.
Make them. I'm serious.
I used to be addicted to a bunch of mobile games. What cured me was the decision to simply automate all that stuff. I reverse engineered the game and wrote a bot for it. All those habit forming daily tasks? Automated. I was free. That's when I realized how deep in that rabbit hole I was.
I think a big issue is when you're forced to.
Say you can only text with someone on Instagram but you don't care about the rest of the app..
Well if you create an alternative client just for that purpose you might get a letter from a lawyer (see barinsta).
And no, convincing people to use something just for you on an individual basis is not a solution.
>How many times are people subjecting themselves to social media they don't really want to view because they habitually unlock their phone and check their notifications?
I must be a weird man because the first thing I do on any new phone/tablet is block notifs from everything including the kitchen sink.
If it's a notif, it's not worth my time as far as I'm concerned. If you want or need my attention, fucking call me instead; no guarantees I'll pick up, of course. You don't have my phone number? That's your answer.
> If that was taught as a class in high school, it might eliminate long-term drug addiction.
I appreciate the sentiment — reducing long-term drug addictions would be wonderful —- but saying “might” is only a starting point for such an analysis of how to achieve it.
Books provide one mechanism to bring a conscious appreciation of techniques for
habit formation and dissolution. Putting them into practice requires sustained effort by individuals and groups.
Have a high level summary? The whole place the gym bag in front of the door as success I feel is misplaced (yes) without a reward loop (unique to each person).
A large chunk of your daily behaviors are governed by habits. Habits are made up of cues followed by some sort of routine that you do which results in some sort of reward. If you want to change a habit then you need to focus on the cues that set off the routine. When a cue occurs, alter the routine and give yourself an alternate reward.
I used to have a drinking problem, say 1-2 bottles of wine a night every night. I cook almost every night in my house, so starting to cook dinner was a major cue for me to start drinking. Specifically, whenever I would put on my apron around 6pm I would get a strong urge to pour a glass of wine. I had a lot of difficulty resisting that urge even when I genuinely wanted to quit. It felt eerily automatic and involuntary. I didn't start having success until I focused on that cue and replaced the routine that followed it. For me, I decided I would put on my apron and immediately make myself a plate of fancy cheese and some crackers. I still had a routine and a reward after my cue, but the new routine was significantly less destructive.
So you're right with your exercise example that simply placing your gym bag by the door isn't going to be successful. You need some cue to go exercise, then exercise, then immediately reward yourself with some chocolate or your favorite candy or whatever.
I won't go so far as to say we can cure everyone's addiction with this one neat trick, but I have found it to be a useful framework on my life.
> If that was taught as a class in high school, it might eliminate long-term drug addiction.
How will reading a book help anyone with physiological dependency to quit a drug? Some drugs like alcohol can't be quit by going cold turkey. Unless you want to end up like that cold turkey (i.e. dead).
Let alone other factors like being environment, outlook on life, etc.
> How many times are people subjecting themselves to social media they don't really want to view because they habitually unlock their phone and check their notifications?
> Telling people to 'use less' and 'monitor' are [easily overwhelmed by] addictive platforms.
Yes! It is foolish to rely on individual willpower in the context of systems that were designed to be (or evolved to be) addictive.
We need some combination of:
- a broad cultural mindset shift whereby people recognize the current reality and realistic ways to improve it
- political will for policy changes that reduce the addictive dark patterns used by our online ecosystem so it can be a “fair fight” at least
- technology that serves humans core values, instead of preying on their weakness
- business models to adapt; they always do
Business models will adapt, even if some particular businesses do not.
So many so-called ‘business’ people tend to use their wealth and influence to sway politics and policy so they don’t have to do the hard work of adapting their business to the scenarios of the future.
It is selfishly preferable to make your own future, indeed. This is good work if you can get it. In other words, this is rational and expected behavior. So, public policy is wise to be a step ahead of business entanglements and entrenchment.
It makes one question the line between functioning in a market versus defining that market. Many business people conflate the two ideas, as evidenced by their actions and their mindsets.
Some make the claim that fiduciary responsibility demands such action by corporations. Perhaps in the short run.
But I would argue that fiduciary responsibility writ large demands a longer-term eye towards not “poisoning the well”.
By this I mean: if social media platforms act in ways that lead to public outrage and backlash, they would fail their shareholders very miserably. Defining the time horizon is key.
Additionally, it is possible for organizations to clarify their missions; namely, who they are serving. It does not have to be shareholders at the exclusion of everything else. Broader and more balanced charters can give more leeway for a chief executive to act in ways that play better with the ecosystem as a whole.
Have I got this right, more or less? Maybe. But there might be unintended consequences. In particular, “playing nice with the ecosystem” might be hard to distinguish from “anti-competitive behavior”. It sounds tricky, but we should give it a lot of thought and try out the best ideas.
I blocked facebook and instagram on my computer by updating the /etc/hosts file.
Now going to either site results in a 404, along with many other sites that are embedded in muscle memory.
This changed my life. I'm unfamiliar with that app, I use Cold Turkey Blocker and iOS screen time. My wife keeps the passwords if I need to make changes or unlock things.
This looks great, except I have a lot of linux devices, which doesn't look supported. Currently I'm often avoiding my app/website blockers by switching devices or browsers.
I have a book I wrote that might help you. Feel free to send me an email and I'll send you a free copy (applies to anyone reading and can find my email on my website)
I don't think this is fair. Knowing what should be avoided is a prerequisite for figuring out how to avoid it. Communicating what should be avoided should be done even if the "how" isn't really understood/thought out.
My kids thankfully are not into (and we don't allow) "social media" -- no Instagram, TikTok, etc. So they're not posting selfies and waiting for the Like count to go up.
But they do spend a ton of time in online chats (Discord, Google Hangouts/Meet/whatever). Only in groups with friends, never in public rooms with strangers.
On the one hand, it is essential that they be allowed to participate in these chats, since that is how they kids are hanging out now. On the other hand, holy crap the new ways to bully and mean to each other!!
No, they’re definitely not chatting with strangers.
They spend a lot of hours on chat (teen/preteen), and some parents might cut them off at night -- but we don't. We can clearly hear that they're talking with friends. So we let them burn the hours in chat because it's how they socialize... and as a side effect it doesn't leave any time left over for random stranger forums.
> There is growing concern about the role of social media use in the documented increase of adolescent mental health difficulties. However, the current evidence remains complex and inconclusive. While increasing research on this area of work has allowed for notable progress, the impact of social media use within the complex systems of adolescent mental health and development is yet to be examined. The current study addresses this conceptual and methodological oversight by applying a panel network analysis to explore the role of social media on key interacting systems of mental health, wellbeing and social life of 12,041 UK adolescents. Here we find that, across time, estimated time spent interacting with social media predicts concentration problems in female participants. However, of the factors included in the current network, social media use is one of the least influential factors of adolescent mental health, with others (for example, bullying, lack of family support and school work dissatisfaction) exhibiting stronger associations. Our findings provide an important exploratory first step in mapping out complex relationships between social media use and key developmental systems and highlight the need for social policy initiatives that focus on the home and school environment to foster resilience.
An interesting nuance, but I don't think this should be used to dismiss the mental health effects of social media. Social media affects virtually ALL adolescents, while those other factors listed only affect some. Only a subset of adolescents lack family support or are bullied. The third factor, dissatisfaction with schoolwork, would be extremely hard to discern as a cause or effect of depression
Yeah, to add on to this, the article seems to imply a logical leap from
- "social media isn't as bad as bullying or having an unstable home"
to
- "social policy ought to focus on the home and school rather than social media"
But I don't think that follows at all. I don't think anyone disagrees that bullying is bad and stable homes are good. And I think that's always been a goal of child social policy. Social isolation caused by technology might have a weaker effect size, but it affects everyone, including adolescents in stable homes who aren't being bullied. It would be great if we had a lever to pull to get rid of bullying, but in the meantime if the goal is to increase child well-being we ought to act on social media.
How are they defining social media use in their analysis?
Because I'm not sure "estimated time on social media" is really the best way to measure things.
The specific social media services used, and how they are used. Some services can be pretty bad if used in some common ways, but much better if used in a more carefully curated fashion.
Spending endless hours are a sensibly curated subset of reddit could easily be a whole less bad for ones mental health than just a few hours a week on some other services, especially if the user has not (or cannot) carefully curated their feeds on those other services.
> Time spent on social media among the least influential factors in adolescent mental health
But it's the one that's easy to assign blame to: it's the evil (sometimes foreign) big tech companies fault.
Increasingly poor economics prospects, environmental crisis and over-competitive society are much tougher issues to crack, and perhaps, in the case of housing for instance, certain demographics would prefer to blame the "evil screens" rather than their own generation's behavior over the years...
"Increasingly poor economic prospects" isn't true. The world is far wealthier and youth have far better economic prospects than they did in previous generations, when the world was poor and the rate of teen depression/suicide was low.
The two main arguments on mental health "it's the phones" and "the world actually sucks and the kids are right to be depressed." But in the actual data doomerism doesn't correlate with the crisis. Phone usage and decline in face-to-face interaction does.
although I believe the big tech companies are doing their very best to capture attention at all costs, it is a good question to ask why people are in a position to spend so much time on social media and are doing so in place of other activities. For example, the lack of public spaces where one can spend time without spending money, relatively recent parenting practices and legal obstacles to having unsupervised time outdoors, etc.
I don't believe it's the tech companies fault necessarily - but social media definitely plays a big role in my view.
It is extremely easy to get sucked into groups that perpetuate racial/sexist-related hate, self-loathing and suicide, unhealthy self image/comparison to others, endless doom-saying and bad news, etc.
Those can have a huge impact on someone when they're young. (Frankly, they have a huge impact on everyone else, too)
> This recent article suggests other factors might be more important to adolescent mental health.
The algorithm you are implying is: find the most important factor and concentrate on it to the exclusion of others. Not a good way to go with serious problems.
>As researchers have found with the internet more broadly, racism (i.e., often reflecting perspectives of those building technology) is built into social media platforms. For example, algorithms (i.e., a set of mathematical instructions that direct users’ everyday experiences down to the posts that they see) can often have centuries of racist policy and discrimination encoded.9
There's something ridiculous about this statement.
I think it can be summed up in the following ways:
1) Parenting takes effort, use that effort to do 2-4
2) Know what they are looking at, prioritize face-to-face interactions.
3) Know the parents of the kids they are hanging out with.
4) Make sure that the parents of friends have the same values as you when it comes to social media.
This is just for YouTube shorts, but I notice a huge swathe of right wing content being blasted at me whenever I foolishly stray onto that part of the app. I'll get anything from Tate to Rogan to obscure 'Woke-critical' content straight away.
Nothing about it suggests other sites do the same thing, but if right wing content is driving more engagement than left wing content through outrage alone it stands to reason that any reinforcement learning would prioritise it.
There’s zero chance this message was not shaped by social media companies. Any message like this, regarding any industry, would get that industry’s input.
That said, it sure seems like social media companies got this to be as neutral as they possibly could, considering the very strong evidence that social media is extremely bad for kids. We’re definitely soft rebooting the tobacco experience, this time with psychology instead of lungs.
It's interesting to see beauty, appearance, and eating disorders called out, along with racism and bullying, but little else. Those are absolutely problems, and rabbit holes to keep out of, but I'm not sure that calling some specifics out really encompasses the whole problems, or the higher level problems that exist above the topic of content.
At a higher level, short video content has become a super refined version of americas funniest home videos and mtv. There is no narrative between videos, and it just constantly presses the dopamine button.
Then you get the split videos where you have a sensory video playing alongside someone talking.
It also doesn't talk about faux excitement. Every other youtuber that isnt Miss Rachel is yelling or screaming, and basically producing entire videos of hysterical feigning of shock, mouth agasp. That transcends nearly any topic.
It also doesnt talk about learning to navigate youtube vs being fed youtube by youtube.
It also doesnt talk about advertising, especially the organicish kind. Teaching kids that the video about a guy making pancakes with Prime is a Prime ad.
It also doesnt talk about replacing friends with celebrities.
It might help the mental health of the parents, and increase interaction with their children, if they cut back on their social media use themselves. It would definitely serve as a good example. (I realize I'm saying this via a social media channel while being a father. I get that it's not easy. I am also aware I'm committing hypocrisy.)
My wife and I promised each other not to "share" much (and absolutely no photos) about our child on the Internet (even as the child, getting older, has started asking us to "share" things). I think not being able to use my child for sweet, sweet Internet points was useful in helping me disengage from the least rewarding, most mentally taxing social media (which, for me, was Facebook).
I caught myself replying HN comments during evening read aloud time. I decided to start using the dedicated e-reader, instead of my phone, so that it won't happen again.
A vital amount of social interaction that kids and young adults experience is online. For reclusive or socially anxious individuals it may even be the majority of interaction.
It isn't like how it was 20 or even 10 years ago, blanket banning will leave them significantly socially isolated and stunted. IME anyone over the age of 25 will not fully appreciate this unless they regularly interact with and (critically!) actively listen to what kids have to say.
Taking away heroin from addicted people will leave them feeling bad. That's not a reason to keep supplying it to them.
> blanket banning will leave them significantly socially isolated
If they get that much of their interaction online, they're already socially isolated. That it happens to be called social media doesn't mean it's actually social.
It seems similar to 15ish years ago in some ways. I remember my parents insisting instant messaging would result in us disclosing all our personal information to online predators and being kidnapped, so while most other kids at school were building friendships outside over AIM, we were excluded. Other parents would admirably fawn over how effectively we were restricted from all electronic socialization, while us kids were completely exhausted by the experience and eventually just learned to circumvent NetNanny.
Telling kids today to stay completely off their phones seems even more futile. There's commenters mystified that kids "can't live without their phones"...Well, what do they learn when they are surrounded by adults who literally depend on their phones to live? How many of us are making plans with our own friends without one?
"For reclusive or socially anxious individuals it may even be the majority of interaction"
This is definitely true. But we ought to also consider the risk that tech is creating socially anxious individuals. Some of those kids, if they interacted more in-person and spent less time alone, would eventually find like-minded friends to hang out with.
Ok, so if the world has changed to the point where these kids cannot live satisfied lives without their phones… then we need to start progressively raising the voting age now so they never have any input into how the rest of us live.
We can make them leper colonies filled with screens with up-arrows to click on.
What's the downside, kids miss out, might be excluded by their peers maybe even bullied? Would the parent/child relationship suffer? But would the compound effect be better or worse than exposing a young child to social media? I have no idea but my gut feeling is that people would be better off overall without social media. Just a gut feeling though and we shouldn't make policies based on gut feelings obviously.
You don't need to go to the extreme in either direction. Everything is fine in moderation. Kids are terrible at moderating (adults aren't great either), so use the screen time limits that Apple gives you.
I think they were probably just asked to be as accurate as they could, and no more. There's no clear and compelling reason for a blanket recommendation to avoid social media altogether.
But I'm largely with you. As a practical matter, it's easier just to avoid it entirely.
No reason to let your child any media, unless you want them to be literate or sth.
And social media is less harmful than some traditional ones. It's just that you've been conditioned by the traditional ones to believe they are somehow normal.
This feels so weak and inappropriate. It's easy to say don't do X or don't do Y. But then what? What are they supposed to be doing instead?
God only knows how they'd feel if they instead watched the "news". Perma-war, climate change, constant political cluster fuckery, the latest fear-mongering narrative, stranger danger, etc., etc.
The APA should prescribe a mirror for every adult, and ask them to spend time thinking about the world we're creating for future generations (i.e., current adolescents).
What are they supposed to be doing instead of social media? Social media was invented like 10 minutes ago. And they certainly don't need to watch the news on a regular basis.
Play sports, build things, read books, create art (write, draw, paint, design, play music, etc etc), learn new things worth learning, and - God forbid - be BORED sometimes and have to come up with their own adventures and activities.
Parents need to be actively providing children with avenues for their own development and creativity. There are infinite options.
This is the same APA that in 2019 published guidance on toxic masculinity. While they're likely right on this topic as social media is a cancer, this is not a serious organization that should be paid attention to.
Readit News
How many times are people subjecting themselves to social media they don't really want to view because they habitually unlock their phone and check their notifications?
These kind of things are fighting fire with a squirt gun. Telling people to 'use less' and 'monitor' are easy to beat with addictive platforms.
Before doing a thing - particularly things I can easily lose myself in, like doom scrolling - I take a few moments and ask myself what I want out of that time, which naturally dovetails into how long I want to spend at it. Maybe it's ten minutes. Maybe it's three hours. Then I set a timer for that long, and when the timer goes off, (notionally) I halt, walk away from the thing for another few moments and re-evaluate. Maybe I go back. Maybe I don't. Maybe I go back after doing something else for a few minutes (say, loading a dishwasher).
One of the key bits it to not judge myself or my wants. If I want to binge Factorio for a day... like, alright. I'll do that, even if I know later-me won't like having done that. No judgment, no beating myself up about it.
Another key bit seems to be not not doing the thing. That's a hard fight. AFAICT it's one part awareness, one part wedging in some mental/emotional space to make choices inside the habit loop (stimulus -> response -> reward), and one part good old fashioned habit-loop interruption (AFAIK if you literally add breaths-worth of time to each step in the habit loop, it drastically diminishes the oomph of what's happening neurologically).
The magic seems to happen in two forms:
1. "Taking control of my time." - Even if I'm making the same choices, now, my experience is that I am making them, instead of "them" making me.
2. "Stopping before you're tired means you don't start the next thing exhausted". Previously I'd binge until I beyond exhausted my enjoyment of the thing. Now I have a way to do a thing while I'm enjoying it, and stop once I no longer am.
PS - I've also started wondering if this is whatever the hell people actually meant when they talked about "time management" when I was kid, but no-one actually ever explained.
I was told to replace bad habits with other things. It didn't have to be some "good habit", but there had to be something else to fill the void left by the thing I wasn't doing. I had a list (I still have it somewhere) of healthy things that I enjoy, that I can do instead of falling into a porn binge (its been almost 5 years since I last willingly looked at porn) or a YouTube hole (that's been less than a week, small steps).
Having a list of other things to do, things I enjoy, made stopping unhealthy habits a lot easier. I didn't strap myself to "being more productive", rather I just replaced bad habits that produce dopamine hits with enjoyable things that produce dopamine hits.
We'll call it the Zapchat or the Zapper and we guarantee it'll be SHOCKING how effective it is at keep us from looking at our screens every 5 min
Many, though not all, of the people here and in the YC ecosystem etc., work or have had worked or otherwise made their careers (and fortunes),
helping concerns whose business model is entirely, openly, founded on maximizing user growth and user engagement. So as to sell personal data in one direction and ads in the other.
This has been something like at trillion-dollar endeavor, and a lot of those dollars have gone into the science (formal and "field") of ensuring those two things.
I.e, to MANUFACTURE ADDICTION.
It's not a bug. It's not just a feature. It's THE feature.
What I tell my own kids, who are not allowed on TikTok, or any Meta property, at all, full stop,
is that against the evolved state of these properties, on our twinkly devices, we have no more defense against addiction than we do against the physiologically analogous fat and sugar.
It's not about discipline. It's not about habit formation. It's not about best practices in schools. It's not about "downtime" and tepid screen time controls.
The problem is more fundamental, and much, much, much uglier, and much, much, much intractable, than most discourse about it admits.
The only solution today, literally, is not to play the game.
Footnote: AI is going to make things 1000x worse, which I would not have believed possible a few years ago.
I don't understand - we have quite a lot of defense against those things.
Most people can easily quit most things, that’s why addiction is treated as a pathological condition.
I suspect its more like “I read Power of Habit, so I am inclined to credit Power of Habit with my normal human ability to quit things” combined with “I exhibit the common human trait of mistaking my normal human ability to quit things with superiority to people who fall into addiction”.
I mean no ill-intent, but this feels like an incredibly naive thing to say. The inference "I read X book, therefore I am immune to / protected from addiction".
I didn't think it needed spelling out that they were saying "I read this book, I understood its message and was able to incorporate it into my life with notable results, so I am better at quitting or avoiding addictive behavior"
Via iOS' automations feature the app allows you to configure a per-app waiting period during which you can decide you don't actually want to open whatever app you've tried to open.
Very grateful for this tool.
I've also customised the automations so I have added friction to opening, for example, Slack after 6PM or on weekends. However it opens immediately during working hours.
Deleted Comment
If I had kids I would 100% send them to a school that banned smartphones with dumb phones for texting and calling the only thing allowed between classes.
Make them. I'm serious.
I used to be addicted to a bunch of mobile games. What cured me was the decision to simply automate all that stuff. I reverse engineered the game and wrote a bot for it. All those habit forming daily tasks? Automated. I was free. That's when I realized how deep in that rabbit hole I was.
Programming changes lives.
What the hell does that have that is so extraordinary that you gain magical powers to break any and all habits? x) Genuinely curious.
Regarding drugs I would be surprised if addicts are simply not evaluating their situation properly in order to "think their way out".
I must be a weird man because the first thing I do on any new phone/tablet is block notifs from everything including the kitchen sink.
If it's a notif, it's not worth my time as far as I'm concerned. If you want or need my attention, fucking call me instead; no guarantees I'll pick up, of course. You don't have my phone number? That's your answer.
I appreciate the sentiment — reducing long-term drug addictions would be wonderful —- but saying “might” is only a starting point for such an analysis of how to achieve it.
Books provide one mechanism to bring a conscious appreciation of techniques for habit formation and dissolution. Putting them into practice requires sustained effort by individuals and groups.
A large chunk of your daily behaviors are governed by habits. Habits are made up of cues followed by some sort of routine that you do which results in some sort of reward. If you want to change a habit then you need to focus on the cues that set off the routine. When a cue occurs, alter the routine and give yourself an alternate reward.
I used to have a drinking problem, say 1-2 bottles of wine a night every night. I cook almost every night in my house, so starting to cook dinner was a major cue for me to start drinking. Specifically, whenever I would put on my apron around 6pm I would get a strong urge to pour a glass of wine. I had a lot of difficulty resisting that urge even when I genuinely wanted to quit. It felt eerily automatic and involuntary. I didn't start having success until I focused on that cue and replaced the routine that followed it. For me, I decided I would put on my apron and immediately make myself a plate of fancy cheese and some crackers. I still had a routine and a reward after my cue, but the new routine was significantly less destructive.
So you're right with your exercise example that simply placing your gym bag by the door isn't going to be successful. You need some cue to go exercise, then exercise, then immediately reward yourself with some chocolate or your favorite candy or whatever.
I won't go so far as to say we can cure everyone's addiction with this one neat trick, but I have found it to be a useful framework on my life.
I tried writing my own blog post, and I don't think I got any positive feedback.
There might be a bit of nuance that a summary doesnt catch.
Anyway, I'd pay 100k to read Power of Habit, you basically can do whatever you want when you learn how the brain works.
How will reading a book help anyone with physiological dependency to quit a drug? Some drugs like alcohol can't be quit by going cold turkey. Unless you want to end up like that cold turkey (i.e. dead).
Let alone other factors like being environment, outlook on life, etc.
> Telling people to 'use less' and 'monitor' are [easily overwhelmed by] addictive platforms.
Yes! It is foolish to rely on individual willpower in the context of systems that were designed to be (or evolved to be) addictive.
We need some combination of:
- a broad cultural mindset shift whereby people recognize the current reality and realistic ways to improve it
- political will for policy changes that reduce the addictive dark patterns used by our online ecosystem so it can be a “fair fight” at least
- technology that serves humans core values, instead of preying on their weakness
- business models to adapt; they always do
Business models will adapt, even if some particular businesses do not.
So many so-called ‘business’ people tend to use their wealth and influence to sway politics and policy so they don’t have to do the hard work of adapting their business to the scenarios of the future.
It is selfishly preferable to make your own future, indeed. This is good work if you can get it. In other words, this is rational and expected behavior. So, public policy is wise to be a step ahead of business entanglements and entrenchment.
It makes one question the line between functioning in a market versus defining that market. Many business people conflate the two ideas, as evidenced by their actions and their mindsets.
Some make the claim that fiduciary responsibility demands such action by corporations. Perhaps in the short run.
But I would argue that fiduciary responsibility writ large demands a longer-term eye towards not “poisoning the well”. By this I mean: if social media platforms act in ways that lead to public outrage and backlash, they would fail their shareholders very miserably. Defining the time horizon is key.
Additionally, it is possible for organizations to clarify their missions; namely, who they are serving. It does not have to be shareholders at the exclusion of everything else. Broader and more balanced charters can give more leeway for a chief executive to act in ways that play better with the ecosystem as a whole.
Have I got this right, more or less? Maybe. But there might be unintended consequences. In particular, “playing nice with the ecosystem” might be hard to distinguish from “anti-competitive behavior”. It sounds tricky, but we should give it a lot of thought and try out the best ideas.
Deleted Comment
Or we could just throw up our hands at the epidemic of teen girl suicide and say "oh they shouldn't do that"
What a joke the APA has become
But they do spend a ton of time in online chats (Discord, Google Hangouts/Meet/whatever). Only in groups with friends, never in public rooms with strangers.
On the one hand, it is essential that they be allowed to participate in these chats, since that is how they kids are hanging out now. On the other hand, holy crap the new ways to bully and mean to each other!!
There are a _lot_ of strange chatrooms with "strangers" on Discord, including a lot of porn on Discord for example.
They spend a lot of hours on chat (teen/preteen), and some parents might cut them off at night -- but we don't. We can clearly hear that they're talking with friends. So we let them burn the hours in chat because it's how they socialize... and as a side effect it doesn't leave any time left over for random stranger forums.
Time spent on social media among the least influential factors in adolescent mental health: preliminary results from a panel network analysis https://www.nature.com/articles/s44220-023-00063-7
> There is growing concern about the role of social media use in the documented increase of adolescent mental health difficulties. However, the current evidence remains complex and inconclusive. While increasing research on this area of work has allowed for notable progress, the impact of social media use within the complex systems of adolescent mental health and development is yet to be examined. The current study addresses this conceptual and methodological oversight by applying a panel network analysis to explore the role of social media on key interacting systems of mental health, wellbeing and social life of 12,041 UK adolescents. Here we find that, across time, estimated time spent interacting with social media predicts concentration problems in female participants. However, of the factors included in the current network, social media use is one of the least influential factors of adolescent mental health, with others (for example, bullying, lack of family support and school work dissatisfaction) exhibiting stronger associations. Our findings provide an important exploratory first step in mapping out complex relationships between social media use and key developmental systems and highlight the need for social policy initiatives that focus on the home and school environment to foster resilience.
- "social media isn't as bad as bullying or having an unstable home"
to
- "social policy ought to focus on the home and school rather than social media"
But I don't think that follows at all. I don't think anyone disagrees that bullying is bad and stable homes are good. And I think that's always been a goal of child social policy. Social isolation caused by technology might have a weaker effect size, but it affects everyone, including adolescents in stable homes who aren't being bullied. It would be great if we had a lever to pull to get rid of bullying, but in the meantime if the goal is to increase child well-being we ought to act on social media.
Because I'm not sure "estimated time on social media" is really the best way to measure things.
The specific social media services used, and how they are used. Some services can be pretty bad if used in some common ways, but much better if used in a more carefully curated fashion.
Spending endless hours are a sensibly curated subset of reddit could easily be a whole less bad for ones mental health than just a few hours a week on some other services, especially if the user has not (or cannot) carefully curated their feeds on those other services.
Deleted Comment
But it's the one that's easy to assign blame to: it's the evil (sometimes foreign) big tech companies fault.
Increasingly poor economics prospects, environmental crisis and over-competitive society are much tougher issues to crack, and perhaps, in the case of housing for instance, certain demographics would prefer to blame the "evil screens" rather than their own generation's behavior over the years...
The two main arguments on mental health "it's the phones" and "the world actually sucks and the kids are right to be depressed." But in the actual data doomerism doesn't correlate with the crisis. Phone usage and decline in face-to-face interaction does.
Two sources:
- "No, teen suicide isn't because the world is objectively worse": https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/02/teen-suicide-depress...
- "Don't be a doomer": https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/dont-be-a-doomer?utm_source=su...
It is extremely easy to get sucked into groups that perpetuate racial/sexist-related hate, self-loathing and suicide, unhealthy self image/comparison to others, endless doom-saying and bad news, etc.
Those can have a huge impact on someone when they're young. (Frankly, they have a huge impact on everyone else, too)
Deleted Comment
The algorithm you are implying is: find the most important factor and concentrate on it to the exclusion of others. Not a good way to go with serious problems.
There's something ridiculous about this statement.
It boils down to, you’ll need to judge for yourself and every child is different but the internet, while great, is terrifying and can be traumatic.
So I’m not sure what we learned here.
1) Parenting takes effort, use that effort to do 2-4 2) Know what they are looking at, prioritize face-to-face interactions. 3) Know the parents of the kids they are hanging out with. 4) Make sure that the parents of friends have the same values as you when it comes to social media.
Deleted Comment
There is a study on the right wing nature of the Shorts algorithm: https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/download/10...
Nothing about it suggests other sites do the same thing, but if right wing content is driving more engagement than left wing content through outrage alone it stands to reason that any reinforcement learning would prioritise it.
That said, it sure seems like social media companies got this to be as neutral as they possibly could, considering the very strong evidence that social media is extremely bad for kids. We’re definitely soft rebooting the tobacco experience, this time with psychology instead of lungs.
At a higher level, short video content has become a super refined version of americas funniest home videos and mtv. There is no narrative between videos, and it just constantly presses the dopamine button.
Then you get the split videos where you have a sensory video playing alongside someone talking.
It also doesn't talk about faux excitement. Every other youtuber that isnt Miss Rachel is yelling or screaming, and basically producing entire videos of hysterical feigning of shock, mouth agasp. That transcends nearly any topic.
It also doesnt talk about learning to navigate youtube vs being fed youtube by youtube.
It also doesnt talk about advertising, especially the organicish kind. Teaching kids that the video about a guy making pancakes with Prime is a Prime ad.
It also doesnt talk about replacing friends with celebrities.
It might help the mental health of the parents, and increase interaction with their children, if they cut back on their social media use themselves. It would definitely serve as a good example. (I realize I'm saying this via a social media channel while being a father. I get that it's not easy. I am also aware I'm committing hypocrisy.)
My wife and I promised each other not to "share" much (and absolutely no photos) about our child on the Internet (even as the child, getting older, has started asking us to "share" things). I think not being able to use my child for sweet, sweet Internet points was useful in helping me disengage from the least rewarding, most mentally taxing social media (which, for me, was Facebook).
I caught myself replying HN comments during evening read aloud time. I decided to start using the dedicated e-reader, instead of my phone, so that it won't happen again.
It isn't like how it was 20 or even 10 years ago, blanket banning will leave them significantly socially isolated and stunted. IME anyone over the age of 25 will not fully appreciate this unless they regularly interact with and (critically!) actively listen to what kids have to say.
> blanket banning will leave them significantly socially isolated
If they get that much of their interaction online, they're already socially isolated. That it happens to be called social media doesn't mean it's actually social.
Telling kids today to stay completely off their phones seems even more futile. There's commenters mystified that kids "can't live without their phones"...Well, what do they learn when they are surrounded by adults who literally depend on their phones to live? How many of us are making plans with our own friends without one?
Newer parents have had the benefit of hindsight and got to see firsthand how fucked places like Facebook can be.
But I'm not sure what the national trend is.
This is definitely true. But we ought to also consider the risk that tech is creating socially anxious individuals. Some of those kids, if they interacted more in-person and spent less time alone, would eventually find like-minded friends to hang out with.
We can make them leper colonies filled with screens with up-arrows to click on.
Deleted Comment
Chicken? or egg?
It's nowhere near that simple unless you're living with the Amish. No social media results in isolation from peers, a cure worse than the disease.
But I'm largely with you. As a practical matter, it's easier just to avoid it entirely.
Deleted Comment
And social media is less harmful than some traditional ones. It's just that you've been conditioned by the traditional ones to believe they are somehow normal.
God only knows how they'd feel if they instead watched the "news". Perma-war, climate change, constant political cluster fuckery, the latest fear-mongering narrative, stranger danger, etc., etc.
The APA should prescribe a mirror for every adult, and ask them to spend time thinking about the world we're creating for future generations (i.e., current adolescents).
Play sports, build things, read books, create art (write, draw, paint, design, play music, etc etc), learn new things worth learning, and - God forbid - be BORED sometimes and have to come up with their own adventures and activities.
Parents need to be actively providing children with avenues for their own development and creativity. There are infinite options.
I'm also pointing out, that they didn't create the shit-show they're going to inherit.
The least we can do should be 5x or 10x better than "Don't _____".
How about "Don't just say don't"?
Students can’t get off their phones. Schools have had enough - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35874246 - May 2023 (133 comments)